Internet Non-Users, From A Political Perspective

Last week I took a couple hours at work and read through Mary Meeker's annual Internet trends report. There's a ton of great data in there, some of it really eye-popping. One thing that caught my eye early on was the data on Internet adoption.

While use of mobile devices as a way of accessing the Internet continues to skyrocket, overall adoption of the Internet has slowed to a crawl. In the US, it's remained essentially unchanged for the last five years. Somewhere between 80-85% of American adults regularly access the Internet at their home, workplace, or school; 15-20% do not.

That's somewhere around 60 million people who go through life each and every day without ever looking at e-mail, loading a news website, compulsively checking Facebook, going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, or playing Tinder. When I think about how much time each day I spend mindlessly "Interneting,"as I've taken to calling it, this is a shocking figure.

The Washington Post published a great breakdown of this crowd of people in August of 2013, based on data from the Pew Research Center. Some of these facts stood out as having particular relevance to politics:

1) According to the Post report, only 53% of Americans over the age of 65% use the Internet. Adults over the age of 65 vote with much more regularity than young voters. This means that a disproportionate amount of electoral power is in the hands of people who cannot in any way relate to how people our age communicate with each other, consume news, research information, find rides in the city, pay each other back, and so forth.

2) Residents of every former Confederate state except Georgia and Virginia, along with Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, New Mexico, and Hawaii have rates of Internet use that trend significantly lower than the national average. Put it another way, "non-users tend to concentrate in the Southeast." So do Tea Party voters. Just saying.

3) Continuing along the same lines, while a bare majority of non-users are restricted from access because of expense or other difficulty, fully 48% of those 60 million people do not use the Internet because they "don't' need it" or are "not interested." Without getting too melodramatic, I think we can almost all agree that the Internet is one of the most far-reaching and useful innovations that humanity has ever come up with. There are so many uses for the Internet that it is simply not possible for it to be entirely useless to anyone. There is a lot of great debate going on among Internet users about how it affects our lives, and whether there might be ways in which the Internet has been harmful in some way. But that the Internet has been a net contributor to humanity stands as one of those self-evident truths, like the idea that the US government should avoid legally defaulting on its debt, or the fact that CO2 emissions are contributing to a change in the Earth's climate.

….oh, wait. Yeah, not everyone believes those things, either.

Given how many millions of voters literally do not believe in these things, it starts to be less surprising that 60 million people in the US don't use the Internet at all.

I think a lot of us get caught up in how far we've come in the last two three decades, technologically speaking; about how much more access to information everyone has today, about how easy it is to communicate across the globe. We talk about these developments as if they were universally embraced --- because how could they not be?

These data serves to remind us that, in considering society, there will always be a class of people who literally reject progress. The fact that these people vote--a lot--helps to explain some of the insanities about our politics.

Collective Thinking and Democracy: Why You Must Vote

Our generation doesn't vote or show any interest in government or politics. OK, that's an exaggeration. But youth turnout, especially in off-year elections, is low and falling. Interest in government service is paltry. Millennials report feeling ignored by a government that is rigged by special interests and ineffective at solving problems.  This lack of interest is not confined to the under-privileged or under-educated. I can't tell you how many of my friends from college have told me that they don't vote because they don't feel informed, because they don't care, or because they are just too lazy.

Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, black, white, or something else, whether you're smart or stupid, this is a big problem for America.

Democracy is the most effective form of government humanity has. While democracies can be slow and frustrating, history has vindicated government by the collective as opposed to the few, from Western Europe to North America, from Ghana to South Africa, to South Korea and Japan.

From a theoretical perspective, this makes sense. The aggregation of many opinions and perspectives is going to be correct more often than the opinions of one person, as subject as individuals are to the emotion, prejudice, and clouded judgment that their own life experiences and struggles bring. Aggregate opinions will almost always be more correct than the decisions of a few people, as these are subject as much to social dynamics as they are to well-considered thought.

I was reminded of this when reading a description of a form of group cognition called "collective thinking,” in Clive Thompson’s 2013 book, Smarter Than You Think. According to Thompson, collective thinking can take place when you "design problems in a way that lets many people pitch in to solve it.” The classic example of collective thinking is the famous experiment performed by scientist Francis Galton in 1906 at a county fair. Galton asked 800 fair attendees to guess the weight of an ox, and the average of their individual answers was far more accurate than the educated guesses of the cattle experts that were present.

In the 21st century, we have many great examples of the power of collective thinking, of which Wikipedia is perhaps the most prominent --- no single person could have written all that knowledge, but by asking everyone to contribute a little bit about what they know, we have one of the most comprehensive sets of information ever assembled.

One of the reasons that democracy has been so effective over its history is because it forces political systems to be accountable to a huge number of people. This de-personalizes politics, and makes it much harder for a group of a few families to carve up the economy for themselves, as has happened in so many countries throughout history. Through the power of collective thinking, political societies under democratic regimes have enjoyed less corruption, and more prosperity, shared by more people.

But collective thinking is conditioned on the idea everyone (or most people) contribute -- and so is democracy. What if Galton had only been able to get 400 fair attendees to guess the weight of the cow? What if he had only been able to get 50 people to care enough to give an answer? Their combined guess would almost certainly have been much less accurate. In that context, siding with the expert's singular opinion would look much more attractive. Democracy's advantages are undercut completely if large subsets of the population refuse to inject their opinions into the policy process. Without participation, we might as well make things more efficient and become authoritarian.

Collective thinking requires that other conditions be met to really work well. Specifically, the collective needs to agree on what their goals are. And contributors must be polite to one another and avoid trying to tear down each other’s work. Obviously, our politics is not meeting these conditions right now. I’m hopeful that we’ll develop ways to get our public thinking on the same page as to what our society’s goals should be, and that we’ll develop more civility in politics as time goes by. There’s also a lot more we can do to create better mechanisms for aggregating public opinion than what we have in place today. Those are topics for other essays.

But for now, we can focus on the easiest part: getting as many people as possible to contribute their piece. In the context of political paralysis and a widening gap between rich and poor, our generation's lack of participation or interest in politics is truly scary. Over a few years, even over a whole generation, we might not notice the deteriorating effects that a decline in political participation has on policy outcomes. But history will not forgive it. Poorly-run societies tend to be, well, poor. Unless you can honestly say you have no care whatsoever if America becomes poor and corrupt, then you need to participate in the system that, indirectly and over years at a time, helps determine the outcome of your life, and your children's lives.

I understand that the exhortation to "make your voice heard" sounds stupid, because in a crowd of millions, your voice will definitely not be heard. So my argument for why you should vote has nothing to do with individual satisfaction, or with trying to make you feel gratified for sharing your opinion.

It has to do with making the very small sacrifice, that, if each one of us makes it, will allow us to live in a society that is more free of corruption, more responsive to groups and individuals, and more able to produce policies that are beneficial to society than any individual's ideas could be.

There are limits to humans thinking individually. Collective cognition is so much more powerful. As we seek to avoid spending all our money and then sinking under the ocean, lets take advantage of collective thinking as best we can.

Beware the Radical Path

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary tonight to a Tea Party-backed candidate in one of the biggest upsets in recent memory. The victor, college professor Dave Brat, ran a disorganized campaign and spent only $200,000 to Cantor's $5 million. But GOP voters in Virginia's 7th District apparently saw the incumbent's halting openness to comprehensive immigration reform as a betrayal of conservative values. Despite his rising-star status and national profile as a conservative counterweight to the supposed moderation of Speaker John Boehner, Cantor is out of a job.

This is merely the most recent Republican to be tossed out of office for being insufficiently conservative. Senators Bob Bennet and Dick Lugar, long considered conservative stalwarts, both lost their party's nomination in 2012 because they voted for the TARP bailouts in 2008. Even Speaker Boehner was the target of a coup attempt at the beginning of the 113th Congress. Conservatives are eating their own young. It's not going to end well for the Republican Party, but in the meantime, it's bad news for America, as well.

We've seen this pattern in history before. Across the globe, radical factions render themselves irrelevant by demanding ideological purity from their members and eschewing all forms of compromise, wreaking havoc in their societies along the way. China's Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s is an instructive example.

Proponents of the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966 were characteristically fanatical in their beliefs and uncompromising in their enmity for anybody who disagreed with them. Millions of government workers, many of whom had fought for the Communist cause during China's revolution and civil war, were branded as "capitalist roaders" and forced from their jobs. At the urging of Lin Biao and others in Mao Zedong’s inner circle, mobs of youths called “Red Guards” roamed the country, burning temples, destroying artwork, and torturing intellectuals, as the new socialist paradise they were hoping to establish required that everything from prior eras be purged. Anybody who opposed them was subject to humiliation, torture, or even summary execution.

Government ceased to function, and in this tense ideological atmosphere, nobody was safe. The radicalism could not be controlled, and soon even the movement's original proponents themselves became targets. By 1971 Lin and other early Cultural Revolution leaders had  been branded as traitors and either imprisoned or exiled. At the movement's peak, there were very few experienced administrators left to perform vital government functions. Millions of Chinese people died and untold wealth was lost as the economy entered a prolonged standstill. The Red Guards may have had the most passionate fervor and the purest ideological beliefs, but they didn't now anything about how to make their socialist paradise work in the real world.

By 1976, radical leaders had finally lost all credibility, and after Mao died, moderate forces were able to regain influence and reassert a measure of sanity to China's politics and the economy. But the damage done by the political chaos, in which anybody who knew anything about governing was marginalized or worse, still lingers to this very day.

Back home in America, I don't think we'll ever suffer the level of violent chaos that China went through in the 60's. I also don't think that the Tea Party movement, as loud and angry as it gets, will ever succeed in achieving actual power on the scale that the Red Guards achieved. But we should take warning from this period in Chinese history.

Often, the realities of governing require leaders to subsume their ideology in order to avert crisis. Once a political system starts to punish its leaders for making hard decisions and rewards them for using ideological conformity as a political weapon, the country suffers. Republicans have started down this path, and with Tea Party-elected House Republicans obstructing all manner of needed reforms, America has already started to see the consequences.  For the sake of the country, I hope that voters can wake up to the true culprits in the stalled drama of our politics.

The Mad Men Comeback Trail: Don Draper as Odysseus

Mad Men is a very literary show. Matthew Weiner is evidently an exceptionally well-read and thoughtful individual, with great appreciation for the artistic and historical context of his subject matter. I very much view Mad Men as being of the Western literary canon. Because of this, I have a hunch that Don is poised for a stunning personal and professional comeback.

When Don returns to his old ad agency in Field Trip, the third episode in the show’s seventh season, he is unwanted, almost forgotten. His own former subordinates are shocked to see him, bemused as to what he is doing there. Some, like Peggy, were outright nasty to him. Most of the partners who put him on leave don’t really want him back. His replacement, Lou Avery, blasphemes Don’s style of dramatic creative with his regime of mediocrity. Don is not given back his old job, but is demoted to copywriter, reporting to Lou. His continued employment is predicated on his following of a set of onerous rules, designed only for him. By accepting these humiliating terms from the agency he built, Don is performing an act of great humility.

A hero demonstrating humility far below his station in his own home has precedent in the Western literary tradition of which Mad Men is a part.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus returns to Ithaca in rags, unrecognizable to his own subjects. He cannot return to his rightful place in his palace next to his wife, Penelope, because his palace is crowded with vile suitors, drinking his wine, trashing his property, trying to get Penelope into bed. Our hero is forced to take shelter in the hut of his old swineherd.

Odysseus, as we know, is down, but not out. One by one, he reveals himself to subjects and family members after being assured of their loyalty. Through planning and ingenuity, Odysseus executes an elaborate scheme to reveal his identity. In the epic’s climax, Odysseus strings his stubborn old bow and kills every last one of the suitors, finally reclaiming his home and legacy.

I don’t think Don is going to go on a killing spree, and I don’t think his story will have such an unambiguously triumphant ending. But the precedent of the Odyssey makes me hopeful that Don will be able to slowly remind his colleagues why they respected him so much in the first place, and vindicate his creative craft.